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Your Posthumanism is Boring Me
io9
May 12, 2010
We will never be posthuman, because we have always been posthuman.
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Posted by Giulio Prisco on 05/13 at 11:38 AM
For the people living in a future surrounded by altered genomes, implanted machinery, and vastly extended lifespans, it will all be boringly normal. Unworthy of comment. And very, very human.
I agree with Jamais: this is what I have always thought.
To be clear: I hope, and think, that we will evolve and change beyond the wildest dreams of our generation. Immortality, mind uploading, life in VR worlds as pure software beings, travel to the galaxies as bits carried by magic light… and I think our descendants will find this future magic just a part of boring daily life. And The Future will always be made by hopes and dreams.
To make clear that also very radical and unPC transhumanists can agree with Jamais on this point, I wish to reword the last sentence as:
For the people living in a future surrounded by super human AIs, uploaded minds, synthetic realities, and immortal artilects roaming the universe, it will all be boringly normal. Unworthy of comment. And very, very human.
Posted by David Roden on 05/14 at 04:11 AM
I like this article because it encapsulates a widely disseminated fallacious objection to posthumanism in the clearest terms.
‘Humans necessarily augment.’
doesn’t entail that
‘Necessarily all augmentations to humans will result in more humans.’
This is a non-sequitur. The fact that augmenting is a necessary property of humans doesn’t mean that non-humans can’t be augmenters as well. The only way round this is to change the premise to ‘Necessarily all augmenters are humans’. You’d get the desired conclusion, but at the expense of an implausibly strong transcendental assumption.
It’s also epistemically dubious to take the subjective apprehension of difference as a measure of difference. It’s probably quite boring being a slime mould from Alpha Centauri but this doesn’t entail that slime moulds from Alpha Centauri are humans.
Still, I like this article. It’s good to be able to disagree substantively.
Posted by iPan on 05/14 at 10:38 PM
So what?
Hey, that blonde in the pic above is a cutie 
This whole article sounds like an argument over whether or not Green Day or Blink 182 is punk or not (sorry, I just had a conversation with my nephew over this - he’s 15, I’m 32).
Who cares?
Actually, this article is more banal than people’s arguments over what it means to be “posthuman”. At least the people arguing over that are trying to define something, rather than just cynically trying to point out it’s meaninglessness.
Oh Jesus….I just realized I’m a hypocrite for commenting on it….
Posted by Michael Anissimov on 05/15 at 12:57 AM
I disagree. I don’t think that Jamais understands how abrupt an MNT revolution could be once the first nanofactory is built, or how abrupt a hard takeoff could be once a human-equivalent artificial intelligence is created.
Read Nanosystems, then “Design of a Primitive Nanofactory”, and look where nanotechnology is today.
For AI, you can do simple math that shows once an AI can earn enough money to pay for its own upkeep and then some, it would quickly gain the ability to take over most of the world economy.
Have Giulio or Jamais read “Design of a Primitive Nanofactory” or Nanosystems?
Posted by William Carlton on 05/15 at 11:41 AM
I have had the same notion recently. Not that transhumanism is boring. No, I don’t think so. I’ve had the notion that from our historical perspective (and for those in the future who won’t be moving as fast as us), the Singularity appears very abrupt. But, from the perspective of, I think, the vast majority of human beings who will go along for the ride—-and ultimately the only surviving faction of humanity that will be around for it to make a difference—-we will never really “experience” a Singularity.
Please feel free to correct my physics, but it’s kind of like falling in a black hole. As you approach the event horizon, gravity warps space/time so much that you never really “experience” yourself crossing over.
I’m not saying that I find this CONVINCING, but it’s an argument.
Posted by Giulio Prisco on 05/15 at 11:55 AM
@Michael - I did, and I can imagine a very fast takeoff MNT revolution.
But my point is that we have already been through fast takeoff revolutions in telecom, and today’s kids just use Facebook on their Iphones on public WiFi hotspots without even thinking about it.
Tomorrow’s kids will be at least as smart as today’s, and they will learn the new ways immediately. Things may accelerate and go faster, but so will people’s abilities (already augmented by their cognitive exoselves).
Posted by Michael Anissimov on 05/15 at 03:40 PM
Giulio, a fast MNT revolution could lead to some obscure country, say Kazakhstan or North Korea, taking over the world in less than a year. Are you sure that kind of instability is something that kids would just “learn the new ways” about? How about going from a world with today’s privacy to literally zero privacy in under a year? How about the sudden introduction of thousands of new mind-blowing designer drugs that get millions of teenagers into all-night partying? How about pornography so realistic that husbands leave their wives for haptic porn and millions of people quit their jobs to stay in virtual worlds all day? What about assassin robots so small and effective that anyone can kill their enemies without fear of repercussion? Or when ten new arms races are kickstarted simultaneously around the world, and warring ethnic factions finally have a realistic means to wipe each other out once and for all?
Will people just “get used” to all of this overnight? Maybe you and a few others might, but I have a feeling that the other 99.999% of humanity is going to freak out, and the situation will be nothing like Jamais claims here.
Posted by Tim Tyler on 05/16 at 04:21 AM
If Kazakhstan or North Korea beat America, Europe, China and Japan to nanotechnology, that would be pretty incredible - and would probably indicate that those other countries had been massively overcautious in their development efforts.
Posted by Giulio Prisco on 05/16 at 12:48 PM
Agree with Tim. Re “getting used”, things happen faster and faster to each generation, but people also adapt to new things faster.
Posted by Greg Trocchia on 05/16 at 07:48 PM
“Giulio, a fast MNT revolution could lead to some obscure country, say Kazakhstan or North Korea, taking over the world in less than a year.”
Michael, I think you are wildly overestimating just how fast a first-generation MNT capability can be translated into military advantage (even presuming that Kazakhstan or North Korea could steal a march on DARPA, which has shown quite a bit of interest in Nanotechnology in general and seems to interested in MNT).
First off, there is what I term the “eutactic paperweight” problem. Like the early PCs at the dawn of the microcomputer revolution, the first nanofactories are likely to arrive without the ability to make much, certainly without the ability to make much in the way of advanced weaponry. This is because, like PCs, nanofactories are generalized devices capable of building many things rather than inherently able to build a single thing. Like the early PCs, it will take time, significantly more time than you seem to think likely IMO, for the instructions for building specific products that could be useful in taking over the world to be developed.
Then, even if this were not the case, the process of weapon design for advanced weapons is best described as a software design project with some conjoint hardware development thrown in for good measure. This was already widely understood to be the case when I left the Military-Industrial Complex in the early ‘90s. Without this vitally important software component, which MNT does essentially nothing to help you develop more quickly, the ability to churn out complex hardware (once the instructions for fabricating that hardware, which is a sort of software design project in itself, is written) is essentially useless.
Worrying that if one were to drop a working Nanofactory (especially without a catalogue of instructions for products for it to churn out) into a place like Kazakhstan or North Korea, they could become instant world powers is getting yourself all worked up over nothing. MNT will, I expect, turn out to have great military and economic utility, BUT this utility will take time to develop rather than showing up fully formed (and armed) like latter-day Athena emerging from the head of Zeus.
Posted by Michael Anissimov on 05/16 at 08:23 PM
Maybe Kazakhstan and North Korea are bad examples. A better example might be an accelerated arms race between existing superpowers.
We already have full blueprints for a number of weapons and other devices, and insofar as most of the crucial components are made out of stainless steel or other metals, designs can quickly be made to substitute diamondoid or fullerene components for the original metallic ones. Most of the non-structural components in guns, for instance, would interoperate just as easily with diamondoid as metal. I’m not talking about designing new weapons from scratch, just copying the blueprints from existing weapons to make diamondoid versions, which would offer substantially better performance.
The first nanofactories will necessarily be designed to produce other nanofactories, which is a huge task unto itself. If a nanofactory can build all the complex parts in another factory, then it will naturally be capable of manufacturing a number of simpler products. Even a diamondoid mortar consisting of little more than a hollowed-out cylinder and diamond slugs would confer a major advantage on the battlefield of the future.
3D scanning has already progressed to the point where reverse-engineering arbitrary devices is much simpler than it used to be.
This is all an engineering/science issue, not a cultural issue. If science and engineering facts permit extremely powerful weapons to be constructed with early-stage nanofactories, then we have a huge problem, regardless of the surrounding cultural context. Even if the USA develops nanofactories first, it’s still a huge problem because our sudden massive increase in military power will alarm other countries. But if we don’t develop the technology rapidly and first, someone else will simply do it.
Posted by Valkyrie Ice on 05/19 at 07:28 PM
Well, my reply to this was just put up at H+ http://www.hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/ten-thousand-waves-change-welcome-tweens
The gist? Jamais is right… but completely overlooks the fact that we are already ignoring the ten thousand revolutions and changes which are taking place right now because we are so focused on the end results.
Posted by Greg Trocchia on 05/20 at 02:38 AM
“Most of the non-structural components in guns, for instance, would interoperate just as easily with diamondoid as metal. I’m not talking about designing new weapons from scratch, just copying the blueprints from existing weapons to make diamondoid versions, which would offer substantially better performance.”
Re-implementation of existing weapon systems may well provide performance benefits, but I suspect that they are unlikely to be the kind of game-changer that, for example, stealth technology or precision guided munitions are. I suspect that it would be much more akin to the introduction of Chobham armor: you certainly want to have it (or follow-ons to it) on your tank if you can, but it is not a revolution in military affairs unto itself. I think that the really impressive military benefits to MNT are going to be a while in developing, which I think is probably a good thing.
“Even if the USA develops nanofactories first, it’s still a huge problem because our sudden massive increase in military power will alarm other countries.”
The thing is that the lead that the US *already* has in conventional military power is so huge that I am not sure that throwing MNT into the mix will matter all that much. US military spending approximates that of the rest of the World put together. The US spends more on military R&D than the UK, itself one of the bigger military powers, spends on its whole military budget. At most, this would take us back to the where things were post Desert Storm, with the US having no serious military peer competitor on the horizon. Even if I am wrong and there is a full blown revolution in military affairs that can be easily and quickly achieved through MNT, this would still not be unprecedented. The US is the only country in the world ever to possess a nuclear monopoly, we have a track record for not going power-mad even while having that monopoly on such capability. I believe that the reaction to our developing such a technology would be better characterized as envy than alarm.
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